Berit Bliesemann de Guevara

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Aberystwyth University

While the arts can be observed to play a role in both violence and peacemaking, they are often assumed to make positive contributions to postwar peacebuilding processes and have increasingly become attached to ideas of “positive peace” in different key (sub-)disciplines that contribute to the field of “art and peacebuilding” scholarship. Art forms...

This chapter addresses the underexplored physical protection of ex-combatants in the process of reintegration into civilian society. The authors study the example of Colombia where, despite official safety guarantees, more than 300 former FARC guerrillas have been assassinated since the signing of a peace agreement in late 2016. The lack of ex-guer...

This chapter draws on the authors’ experiences of conducting fieldwork with a peace community in the Philippines and with former guerrilla fighters in Colombia, to unpack some of the major challenges of doing fieldwork with conflict-affected communities and (former) armed actors in areas of violent conflict and limited state authority. Guided by th...

This article argues that textiling—a particular kind of making that simultaneously constitutes a concept, a metaphor, and a practice—can facilitate a radical rethinking and redoing of the study of world politics. Specifically, we suggest three ways in which textiling, and the relationality it enables, facilitates this innovation: as a different way...

Worldwide, civilians experiencing violence make agential choices about how they interact with conflict landscapes. This special issue assembles contributions that specifically deepen our understanding of nonviolent civilian agency amid violence. Our Introduction embeds these contributions in a wider overview of the study of civilian agency in war....

In these Dialogues, Lorna Dillon brings together essays that explore the relationship between fiber art and social justice in Latin America. The authors discuss Chilean arpilleras, needlework projects and the struggle for peace in Colombia, the Mexican Embroidering for Peace Movement, and Margarita Cabrera’s fabric sculptures about the US-Mexico bo...

This article discusses narrative practice and textile-making as two techniques of researcher reflexivity in diverse teams conducting qualitative-interpretive research. Specifically, it suggests definitional ceremonies—a collective structured method of storytelling and group resonances—as a useful tool to interweave diverse researchers as a team, wh...

The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation offers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation. With contributions from over thirty distinguished and leading scholars, the Handbook provides a timely, engaging, and critical overview of conceptual foundations, political...

This article argues that arts-based methods such as drawing are particularly useful as means to explore experiential insights into how violent conflict impacts individuals and communities in specific sociocultural contexts and shapes their views of development and peace. It illustrates this through the discussion of a drawing workshop with members...

Guided by a (fictional) interviewer, the authors take the reader on a conversational tour through the process of preparing and conducting fieldwork interviews. The chapter raises ethical and practical questions and discusses potential problems to be faced—no matter how well-prepared fieldwork interviews are. Drawing reflexively on their own experie...

This chapter reviews themes that constitute ten points that all academics planning fieldwork-based research on international intervention should consider. It illustrates how even the most prepared or experienced researchers have struggled with the idea of control over the fieldwork-based research process in a closed or violent context. It also link...

This chapter covers experiences of doing fieldwork. It talks about a gender-balanced group of field researchers at different stages of their careers that work in different countries around the world. It also analyzes how the field researchers did their fieldwork in areas of international intervention into violent conflict and/or illiberal states. T...

Using detailed insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict, this handbook provides essential practical guidance for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent, repressive and closed contexts. Contributors detail their own experiences from areas including t...

Using detailed insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict, this handbook provides essential practical guidance for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent, repressive and closed contexts. Contributors detail their own experiences from areas including t...

This article discusses benefits and challenges of qualitative-interpretive research conducted in teams of outside (Northern) researchers and national (Southern) associates, in which the latter have considerable autonomy over research design and data generation. Reflecting on our collaboration with Burmese associates on arts-based workshops with vio...

This chapter gives an overview of the burgeoning literature on knowledge-related questions in studies of international intervention and statebuilding, which have shifted the research focus to questions of authority, knowledge systems and epistemic practices. This literature highlights a growing interest in the epistemics – that is, the scientific s...

Drawing on our experience of commissioning and co-curating an exhibition of international conflict textiles – appliquéd wall-hangings (arpilleras), quilts, embroidered handkerchiefs, banners, ribbons, and mixed-media art addressing topics such as forced disappearances, military dictatorship, and drone warfare – this article introduces these textile...

Study question: What are the views, experiences and healthcare needs of infertile women from a minority ethnic or religious background living in Wales? Summary answer: Women from ethnic and religious minority backgrounds consider that their communities have highly pronatalistic attitudes and stigmatize infertility, and express the need for more...

Critical peace and conflict scholars argue that to understand fully conflict dynamics and possibilities for peace research should incorporate ‘the local’. Yet this important conceptual shift is bound by western concepts, while empirical explorations of ‘the local’ privilege outside experts over mechanisms for inclusion. This article explores how an...

A growing body of literature has explored the potential for arts-based methods to generate and disseminate research, particularly on sensitive or complex topics. This article presents DrawingOut, a metaphor-centred drawing workshop designed to collect visual and textual data about individuals’ experiences of sensitive or taboo health experiences. T...

Metaphor has been shown to be pervasive in the way people talk and write about a whole range of diseases, including infertility. Indeed, some of the most conventional of these metaphorical expressions have become so entrenched in particular discourse communities that they are used unconsciously and automatically, even by people who do not, in fact,...

Knowledge about violent conflict and international intervention is political. It involves power struggles over the objects of knowing (problematization/silencing), how they are known (epistemic practices), and what interpretations are taken into account in policymaking and implementation. This book unearths the politics, power and performances invo...

This article explores the role of official travel activities by politicians to post-/conflict spaces in German foreign policymaking. Starting from the observation that official travel justifications stress the value of authentic insights and unfiltered information, while journeys in practice are meticulously planned and staged, it asks what kind of...

This article has a twofold aim. First, it discusses the contributions to the scholarly field of conflict knowledge and expertise in this special issue on Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: finding ‘facts’, telling ‘truth’. Second, it suggests an alternative reading of the issue’s contributions. Starting from the assumption tha...

Myths are part and parcel of contemporary international politics, and they are all around us. From the invocation of ‘the international community’ to talk of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyard of empires’ or home of ‘warlords’, and from ideas of ‘antiseptic battlefields’ in modern warfare to concepts of ‘coordination’, ‘participation’ and ‘effectiveness’...

Bliesemann de Guevara develops a conceptual framework for the study of myth in international politics. The chapter gives an overview of the different myth theories drawn upon in the book, with a focus on three dimensions: myths’ narrative and non-narrative forms; their sources in strategic calculation or unconscious social construction; and their e...

This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and o...

The term state formation is most commonly used to describe the long-term processes which led to the genesis of modern political domination in form of the territorial sovereign state. In a few works, the terms statebuilding, nation-building, or institution-building are used synonymously with state formation. In the mainstream literature, modern stat...

Drawing on ideas of the narrative turn in social and cultural studies, this article explores the oral, informal side of communication in contexts of international peacebuilding interventions. It takes urban legends – entertaining stories about events that supposedly happened to ‘a friend of a friend’ and usually contain a moral – as a methodologica...

Cosmopolitanism has been argued to be a crucial component of peacebuilding, both with regard to its aims as well as its staff. In a universalist-liberal understanding of the concept, cosmopolitanism is the optimal mind frame for peacebuilders to rebuild post-war societies, due to the tolerance, justice-orientation, and neutrality regarding local cl...

This special issue studies the International Crisis Group (icg), one of the most notable and widely referenced producers of knowledge about conflict areas, used extensively by policy makers, the media and academics. The authors take different theoretical and methodological approaches to make sense of this hard-to-ignore conflict expert, exploring t...

Exploring the historiography of the International Crisis Group (icg), this article looks critically at the narratives surrounding the organisation’s self-declared success. The focus is specifically on the so-called icg methodology, consisting of field-based research and analysis, practical policy recommendations and high-level advocacy. Combining a...

Bakonyi, J., Bliesemann DeGuevara, B. (2011). The Mosaic of Violence: An Introduction. In B. Bliesemann de Guevara, & J. Bakonyi (Eds.), A Micro-Sociology of Violence: Deciphering patterns and dynamics of collective violence. (pp. 1-17). Routledge.

When political actors and international relations scholars invoke ‘the international community’, the term is commonly framed very loosely. It is used either as a reference to the norms of international politics or, according to its composition, as a coalition of concerned actors. This article, by contrast, argues that it is the interplay of image a...

Bliesemann DeGuevara, B., Bellamy, A. J., Utley, R., & Sharp, J. M. (2011). Peace, Intervention and Legitimate Local Order. International Peacekeeping, 18 (1), 114-123.

Nach westlicher Vorstellung gründet sich ein stabiler Staat auf zwei Faktoren: Handlungsfähigkeit und Legitimität. Die Anerkennung seiner Bürger erlangt er durch Wahlen und die Herstellung von Sicherheit und Wohlfahrt. Um handlungsfähig zu sein, braucht er das Gewaltmonopol und Geld. An den Beispielen Afghanistan und Bosnien-Herzegowina zeigen die...

The ‘international community’ is not the only actor engaged in statebuilding processes; contemporaneously with external intervention, at national and local levels of non-Western societies other actors are also engaged in struggles to establish their own visions of a state. The results are ambiguous: the states built tend to be hybrid, combining for...

Bakonyi, J., Bliesemann DeGuevara, B. (2011). The Mosaic of Violence: An Introduction. In B. Bliesemann de Guevara, & J. Bakonyi (Eds.), A Micro-Sociology of Violence: Deciphering patterns and dynamics of collective violence. (pp. 1-17). Routledge.

The monograph deals with the structural limits of international peace- and statebuilding. I chose a sociological approach to the study of an IR problem, combining it further with insights from political economics and social anthropology, to explore the state-strengthening and state-weakening dynamics brought about by the contemporary international...

This article explores the effects of the contemporary politics of statebuilding on the non-western state. The main argument is that the corresponding strategies of external institution building and/or the international substitution of state functions entail contradictions that inherently limit the chances of an external strengthening of stateness....

A state’s capacity to govern, that is to guarantee universal rights to its citizens, to provide public goods, and to implement coherent decisions despite potential competing interests, depends on different factors, of which a basic one is the state’s extraction capacity. Its fundraising determines the scope of the state’s room for manoeuvre, its go...

Diese Publikation beleuchtet die Arbeit der International Crisis Group und warnt vor unkritischer Annahme und Verwendung ihrer Berichte. Die Autorin erl?utert das T?tigkeitsfeld und die Kompetenzen der International Crisis Group. Sie bescheinigt ihr hohe Qualit?t in einigen Berichten, verweist jedoch auf eine eventuelle Agenda-Setting-Funktion, den...

Das externe State-Building-Projekt in Bosnien und Herzegowina, dessen Ziel es ist, durch Förderung der Transition zu Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft sich selbst erhaltende Staatsstrukturen zu erschaffen, hat sich als schwieriger erwiesen, als von den internationalen Akteuren erhofft. Für Probleme und Rückschläge werden häufig nationalistische politi...

Im nordostindischen Unionsstaat Nagaland gingen der Waffenstillstand und die Friedensgespräche zwischen der wichtigsten Gruppierung der Aufständischen, dem National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) (NSCNIM), und der indischen Regierung 2003 unter positiven Vorzeichen ins siebte Jahr. Zum ersten Mal seit der Initiierung des Friedensprozes...

Entgegen vielen Erwartungen waren die Parlamentswahlen des Jahres 2003 im nordostindischen Tripura nicht von einer derartigen Gewaltwelle begleitet wie noch die Wahlen zum tribalen Selbstverwaltungsorgan im Jahre 2000. Dies lag allerdings nicht an einer Schwächung der Rebellengruppen in dem indischen Unionsstaat, in dem eine weitgehend bengalische...

Die Kriegsaktivität im Bundesstaat Tripura im Nordosten Indiens hat 2001 durch die zweimalige Teilung der größten Rebellengruppe, der National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), an Komplexität zugenommen. Eine durch die inneren Querelen erzeugte Schwächung der Gruppierung und dadurch erhoffte Abnahme ihrer Gewalt in dem Bundesstaat, in dem eine we...